At this point in my cracked-up life: an interview with: Will Harrison
"Making memes is weirdly part of my process now"
Like staring at a detail from a panel of a Bosch painting, I am too close to my friend Will Harrison to take in the whole picture. Who is Will? Well, he’s a writer, a poet, a stoner, a fail son as he recently told me over text. He’s a Columbia MFA, the dude who wrote the Baffler article (yes, that one), a raver, a Mets fan, a pal, a bit of a dick, and, as he said on another occasion most aptly, “a popular nobody.”
To speak to that last qualifier, most of the time when I’m out with Will he bumps into someone he knows. He rarely spends any time at his Bed-Stuy apartment: He’s most likely Citi Biking to Nowadays, sparking a J on the patio, and dancing until at least 4AM.
Or, he’s making sadboi memes about his life live from the 8-Ball space in the East Village. Or, and not to blow up all his spots, he’s shuffling toward Smoke World, where you can buy an eighth for $25, only to land at my and Julia’s apartment for a smoke sesh.
I have little else to say about my fellow Aquarius he/they. Read on to hear us discuss, lord help me, D*mes Square, James Joyce, the lovers and the haters, his notorious article, and other things that will make my grandma wrinkle her brow in consternation.
Me: Will Harrison in the studio
Will: What’s up. It’s a pleasure to be here at --- Hart Street where I’ve never been before.
Me: Oh welcome.
Will: Literally never stepped foot in this apartment.
Me: When did you first really identify as being a writer?
Will: I’ve always had a weird relationship with that question. I grew up with a lot of books in my parents’ house. I still struggle with that label to be honest with you because of genre stuff; the way people choose “I’m a this” or “a that”-writer. I’ve had a willingness to accept that label, but also I’ve always been a reader first, writer second. There was some need to choose that label for myself just as a way of actually getting myself to make anything, write anything, probably starting in high school. But the problem with being like, “I’m a writer,” for me at least, is you give yourself stage fright sometimes.
Me: Being a reader first is really good.
Will: Yeah, being a reader first is really good. I was actually just talking about that with a friend over DM today. About how I feel like, to be honest, right now, I’m in this weird phase where I feel like a terrible reader, which leaves me in this constant identity crisis. I feel like [reading is] how I ground myself or my work or my practice or even my identity. It’s almost like the reading I have done when I was maybe less cracked, less online, it’s in my brain in this weird little soup that’s congealing and intersecting. It’s definitely there and I remember it more concretely like, “This writer, that writer,” on certain days. Sometimes, I forget it’s there but it’s clearly coming out in the work I try to make or the notes I try to take because I feel like this sort of, if not shame, this discomfort with the way my, for lack of a better word, attention span seems to have lessened as a reader in the last two, three, four years.
Me: Do you think you got burned out from grad school?
Will: Yeah, I mean, I think so. I had been writing, off and on, these heavily researched book or art reviews prior to grad school and out of undergrad while doing bullshit work here and there but trying to leave time for that. I still gravitate toward that work on some level but it was starting to feel very serious in a way. Not that seriousness is all bad, but it was starting to feel like I had exhausted that genre for myself, at least for the time. Then I had this body of work that was non-fiction writing and that was what I was able to get into grad school on, but I entered this non-fiction discipline there and I have a weird relationship with non-fiction. It’s definitely a genre that, at its best, is very permissive, capacious, wide, malleable, sort of the way language itself can be ideally, but it also, in practice, was me reading a lot of memoir and then with the work I was making, I wasn’t able to escape that sense of capital S Seriousness. I was making work that felt ambitious but unfinished. I was often getting stuck on the level of the sentence more than getting out of that. Weirdly, that sort of awareness of that tendency to work really slowly with each sentence, to make sure it sounds, sonically, good, I think that inevitably informs my work. But, there’s also this challenge I have to overcome because I have to really be aware of form, at least as just a concept, in order to see anything through. Often, I’m stuck in the middle for so long as I’m going. I begin the thing, the essay, whatever it is, and I start at the beginning and write it all the way through. Not so much without editing, I’m editing as I go. But then that leads to huge challenges if you feel like you’re stuck in the middle, which obviously for so many of us is a frequent occurrence.
Me: Do you feel like you get to have more fun in different forms? I think your poetry is really funny.
Will: Yeah, totally, I mean that actually relates back to what you were even asking me first about the writer label. This sort of ongoing genre crisis informs so much of the work I try to make. I was able to be like, “I’m a writer. I’ll put on that mask or that costume” at a relatively young age, which is immensely privileged because that was normalized in my household. My father is a poet so I grew up going to readings of his; reading books from his pretty massive collection. The language of poetry was always in the prose work I was making. Especially, in grad school I was trying so hard to deflect and defend myself against… people come for your neck in workshop. That almost led to this doubling down of seriousness. The things I wrote had a lyricism, but they were very stilted in a certain way. They were not funny.
Me: Is seriousness a shield?
Will: I do think seriousness can be a shield, at least for me and definitely for some.
Me: Do you feel like you’re hiding in your shell?
Will: Do I think I’m hiding in my shell? Hell yeah. Sometimes. I don’t think permanently. I wouldn’t be in New York if I didn’t want to get out of that shell. I make a concerted effort to get out there and connect with people. In a weird way, with the combination of Covid, and then the insular life for a variety of reasons I was living that I got out of, in the past year or so, I have gotten way more obsessed with the language of conversation. I always felt like I wanted to be a novelist like a lot of aspiring writers do, but dialogue was hard for me. Now that I have developed more of a poetic practice, which is really just riffing with friends, writing it down, putting it in one place, looking at it, and putting it all back together in a new way, I feel like I can actually be myself on the page, which is interesting and ironic because I haven’t published any poetry. I’ve only read once. But I feel way more connected to that work. I feel a desire to, as soon as I clear my fuckin’ head, produce a lot of poetry in the next year or so.
Me: Yeah, let’s do it. World takeover.
Will: No more takeovers.
Me: We’re gonna have to talk about it, the Baffler article. That’s something where you combined autobiography but also you were riffing and using colloquial language and slang. How did that feel for you, writing it? Was it as much turmoil as a straight narrative?
Will: No, no. That piece brought me a lot of turmoil, obviously, after it came out. And as I was writing it, for sure, too. But I do feel like it was the first time that I had written prose that felt fun, playful, colloquial, and for my peer group. Usually, when I write something for The Baffler or a comparable magazine, which is admittedly pretty sparse, two-three times a year because I’m a very slow worker, all those pieces were very researched. It’s just sort of like, “Here’s an article about Larry Sultan who’s a dead quasi-famous photographer and there’s a reissue of his book.” I put that out last November. I posted about it, but I don’t expect all my friends to read that. I don’t expect everyone to read anything I write. You shouldn’t. But I did have a sense with this one that it was a very, very different thing because it was the first time I got paid to write anything that had an element of subjectivity in it. An element of humor. And it was not fixed to the release of a book, an art show, anything like that. It was more an effort, for better or for worse, to tap into the zeitgeist and make a case for people using subjectivity in their work. That’s one of the things I’ve been reflecting on most. A lot of people said a lot of things, but one of the things that really did irk me, at least at times, was this sort of idea that I was like this vain solipsist with my head up my ass writing this thing that was only about myself. When really, it was more an effort to take ideas or impressions of New York that I had talked about with countless friends. It really came out of conversation, this piece, so the fact that it was, to me, implicitly more than explicitly, and I do think this got kind of missed, at least on Twitter, an homage to my friends, to New York, but, y’know, I obviously foregrounded more of the stuff I was critiquing. It was really an attempt to publish something that was an essay or prose that was hopefully fun, funny, had some personality to it. Way too many magazines, even that I respect, have a desire to make every writer they hire or publish sound the same. There’s a house style and that makes me really really anxious as someone, at least in theory, who would like to keep writing over the course of my life. As a reader, too, there’s very little that’s interesting about picking up a magazine and knowing exactly what the house style is and having that expectation not be challenged. It clearly did challenge people, not necessarily in the ways I was expecting, but it was inevitable that people had meltdowns.
Me: You knew there was going to be backlash.
Will: I knew there was going to be backlash. That was why I took pains to try to be pretty even-keeled. It was not a hit-piece. It was not a think piece. I don’t even know what the fuck a think piece is. And I don’t really ever want to read a think piece ever again in my life. I found that refrain that got repeated online— not that I really took any of that that seriously. What really depressed me in the aftermath of all this is that it became clear to me that people don’t realize that the essay as a form is so wide and vast and contains so many variations. But all we seem to have the patience for, at least when it’s something published by a magazine, is a journalistic think piece. I’m all here for research and I like reading good journalism from time to time, but I think it’s pretty evident if you pick up that piece and read a couple of paragraphs that it is not a think piece.
Me: And it’s not reportage.
Will: No, no. It would have been ridiculous for me, a former employee of [movie theater] Metrograph, to write a heavily researched interview-based labor article.
Me: My journalism professors would tell me that it’s unethical to do something like that.
Will: Yeah, quite obviously. And there was a reason I steered clear of all that. I wanted to let those still working there handle their own labor stuff with some privacy. It’s not that I don’t find all that interesting, it’s just it really wasn’t my piece to write. And also it was a weird situation of me knowing I’m working on this but also sort of having to negotiate the potential that ended up not happening. There was a serious potential for a more capital J Journalist to publish a labor piece about Metrograph before my piece came out. That ultimately didn’t end up happening but there were several journalists who were in touch with us.
Me: Do you know why that didn’t end up happening?
Will: A place like Metrograph, insert any blue-chip gallery, etc, etc all these venerable arts organizations, especially if they’re big enough and have enough employees, you can tell if a place is unsavory or has a bad vibe or the communication is off or there’s gaslighting going on of lower-level employees. But all of these things, even though they add up to you the employee knowing that this place is rotting from within, you don’t necessarily have the ammo, the information, the XYZ facts to expose them, bring them down. I feel like there was a certain type of reader who was super horny for that. They really really wanted that.
Me: It’s not a headline to say, “This job in New York City is exploiting its workers.” Every minimum wage job you’re being exploited. Even if you’re getting paid slightly above minimum wage at $18 dollars an hour, you’re still being exploited.
Will: Places feel like they can treat you worse if they’re paying you slightly above minimum wage. We’ve run through all the talking points on that. The same type of person who knows what these institutions are probably also knows that they’re a little bit fucked to work for at some level. It transcends the arts, too. I was working as a library assistant at a prep school in Brooklyn a couple of years ago. I started a couple of weeks into the school year so I was never properly introduced to the faculty/student body. I wasn’t faculty or a student. I was a study hall proctor/archivist (I guess) / occasional tutor. The only people who made me feel part of that community were the maintenance staff. It’s telling. I’m a person who attended a similar type of high school to this and it’s like that inaccessible. Anyway, I feel like we’re getting sidetracked. There’s a reason I didn’t write that much about Metrograph.
Me: It was a setting.
Will: It was a setting, exactly. You get a little more realistic as you get older as a writer. That makes me sound like my grandfather, some conservative or something; it’s more that I know what type of things are in my wheelhouse or out of it as a writer. I’ve always been a writer who is interested in setting, place. I think about Gary Indiana’s Horse Crazy three days a week, at least. I think about Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts, which are Nathaniel West’s L.A. and New York novellas, respectively. Even before I made any work I could even show to anyone, I knew that that was a type of writing that I excelled at. It could be a way to ground this particular essay from a point of observation and literally just a point on a map.
Me: Was New York always a place you thought you’d end up in. It is a place that is really easy to mythologize or it’s really easy to wrap yourself up in its mythology.
Will: Totally. I think that’s part of what gave everyone an aneurysm in this piece is that the whole Dimes Square fantasia concept…. It’s like a 2022 grappling with that exact sort of New York-pilled obsession through the years, which in a lot of ways is a really beautiful thing. I’m glad I’m part of 8-Ball, which is an arts community that has been around for a decade now. It intentionally looks back to previous eras in New York but also beyond. Lineage or history is obviously important to me but, yeah, you don’t want to be naive about it. It’s funny because I loved a lot of the memes that came out in relation to this article. It was an article about liking memes in a lot of ways and internet language and using and chopping up that internet language with friends. It was both gratifying and deeply disturbing to see the thing I worked on for a while become memeified, but I feel like that was the only acceptable fate for this essay.
Me: Do you think it was purposefully misconstrued, your point?
Will: Online?
Me: Yeah. Well, can I tell you my theory?
Will: You can tell me your theory and then I’ll tell you my theory, sure.
Me: My theory is that Dimes Square is a place where rich kids with daddy’s money go out for martinis and they don’t really have anything in the way of a creative community, but there’s this vacuum right now and the spotlight is being shined on Dimes Square because people have identified a milieu. But usually, in the past, milieus were people who were painters or people who were writers who got together and shit talked and drank and then went home and did something. But all these people do is shit talk and drink but they don’t do anything. There was this calculated character assassination of you, Will Harrison, because you dared to shine the spotlight on them and they don’t have a leg to stand on. So instead of saying, “Will’s article is wrong. He missed the mark. This isn’t accurate,” they said, “Will’s a little bitch,” “Will’s an incel,” “Will wants to shoot up a theater and fuck [podcast host] Dasha [Nekrasova].”
Will: That was my favorite tweet. Yeah, I think you’re right about a lot of that. You said it, not me.
Me: I’ll go on record.
Will: Yeah, you can go on record saying all that shit. It was a piece about language. An essay about language. It was not an article; it was an essay. I am an essayist-poet. I don’t write articles really. Even if I’m writing a review of something, it’s an essay review. The essay was so strange to people. At this point in my cracked-up life, I don’t really have the attention span, idk, the interest for dry prose writing. I’m not against an economy of language. Ironically, I write poetry now because I feel like I can be more simple in my language, more communicative, more geared toward my peer group, less, to use the dreaded word, “pretentious” perhaps. When I’m witting prose, as in this case, I really don’t have the patience for a five-paragraph essay-style thing. I think that that really confused people. Or perhaps let people who didn’t really appreciate what I was saying distort it or make it into what they wanted. The form of the essay, the shape of it, is essentially, “Hey, I’m a person, writer, whatever. I worked at this place. We got laid off. People have been gossiping about it. I’ll talk about that a little, but let’s go on a walk together.” At a certain point in the process, each paragraph connected but was about a new thing. It was a movement through space. We start at Metrograph and we end with me, “Go Piss Girl,” the speaker, I will say the speaker because it’s not really me at that point. There’s a sheen of a fairy tale over it and that allowed people to make fun of it. They thought that was corny. I just think people have different aesthetic priorities or interests. I’m influenced by writers like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Like, guy comes to New York, bildungsroman. [Ellison’s] talking about the energy or aesthetic of a fairy tale. And I don’t mean that in a hocus-pocus I’m five years old thing; I mean it more like there’s an element of the imagination of mystery. That is something I engage with a lot. There’s a line about Nabokov, who I’m a big fan of—for me Nabokov is this guy who’s obsessed with puzzles, with burying Easter eggs in a novel of his—they said about him that as a kid the Russian revolution was happening, bombs were going off, his family had to leave, but he’s just writing a poem about his crush. I remember reading that and being like, “Guilty.” I’m not apolitical and this piece isn’t apolitical; it just wasn’t a stump speech. It wasn’t a manifesto. It was really just an effort to lyrically and, hopefully humorously, capture a moment in time, to create what could be as close as possible to a living document. A living, breathing representation of the internet in the year of our lord 2022.
Me: Do you think people missed the humor?
Will: I think people either missed the humor or circumvented the humor because if they get around the humor, they could be humorless about it. What maybe people dragging me online didn’t realize is I’m more connected to that milieu than they realized. This one girl called me an incel and I was like, “No, I’m actually volcel right now,” and she deleted it. We have mutuals. I don’t know why she deleted it but maybe she realized that. It’s fine. I’m a big boy. I don’t need to go to Cladestino anymore. There’s thousands of other bars in this city. (R.I.P. Beverley’s.) Anyone who hit me up being nice about it got this. I was writing it, and I think this is why writers often feel weird about politics. There’s a war going on but I’m a fuckin’ scrawny person. I’m not a fighter. I’ve got one foot in; one foot out. I see the floor, I see the situation, I want to critique it, I want a better world. But I’m not a political leader. I’m not a soldier. I’m just a guy. And I have my weird, little mind. I’m gonna write my weird, little notes. I’m gonna go home and I’m gonna fuckin’ organize them and type them up. I hang out in lower Manhattan pretty often. I just feel like my group of friends actually makes art. I for sure was like subtweeting the social set that I was talking about in the piece but the only people I mention by name are Dasha, [playwright] Matt Gasda, and [Substack writer] Angelicism[01]. Dimes Square, that was a play. Someone from the milieu made some art. That’s really all I can say. It was a play. No shade, I thought it was a 5/10. I didn’t think it was a 1/10. A lot of the obsession with the Dimes Square scene is that it feels like this nice halfway point between, “Wow, these people are so edgy. I can’t believe they said that” but then also, “OK, good, lower Manhattan is cool again. This guy’s white and he looks good in a turtle neck. He’s a playwright. We can do a Styles section profile on him.” It’s safe and edgy, which is this nice compromise for the glossies, The New York Times, shit like that. I think there’s exciting shit happening in New York, too, it’s just happening all over New York. There are a lot more subway stops than East Broadway.
Me: That begs the question: What is the exciting stuff going on in New York right now?
Will: I want to go to the Mothercell show tonight. They’re my friends Mason and Sam and Jack. They’re a hardcore hyper-pop group. That’s the weird thing. I really don’t accept the Brooklyn vs. Manhattan binary even though it does brew some good memes and there is some truth to it. When I first moved to New York, I was trying to work in magazines and that was more like the world that’s in Dimes Square. This bloviating podcaster. It’s a return to tradition. It’s like, “We’re going to be proud to take mommy and daddy’s money to start a gallery or sit outside of Bacaro or whatever. No shade to that but I feel like that scene was boring to me. More of my friends are visual artists or make music or DJ so I feel like that’s what I surround myself with. I like to go out dancing. I like to listen to jungle and drum and bass. That is not very exceptional. That’s certainly part of the zeitgeist right now. When I go to Club Night Club at Sugar Hill Disco or I go to Nowadays, yeah I like sitting outside and rolling up a joint and talking to my friends or meeting some new people, but I’m there to disappear into the music.
[We take a bathroom break and come back. I give Will a talk about how uptight he’s being. We smoke a bit to loosen things up.]
Will: I would like the record to show that we’re now smoking marijuana from Smoke World on Irving catty-corner from everyone’s favorite / least favorite bar, Carmelo’s. This weird little subtext of the essay that I didn’t put in there so I can’t fault anyone for not knowing is when I hung out in that neighborhood, I would go to Beverly’s. That’s where Mason bartended. That was a really fun place to hang. It closed during the pandemic so it was almost like the complexity of that neighborhood got a little bit dented with that. It was like for the skaters or queer music kids or whatever you want to call the people I fuck with. That seemed like the spot for us. And then it’s like Clandestino. It’s a bar. It’s fine. I go there sometimes.
Me: They make a good martini.
Will: They make drinks that are good. It’s fine. When I was writing the essay it was almost like, “Team this versus team that,” which it got reduced to in memes. Implicitly I was engaging with that flattening that happens in memes and I don’t always think that it’s good for our brains but it is fucking interesting. It is inevitably a part of our lives right now. So if I was doing that kind of dichotomized thinking, binaristic thinking, it was like, “Team Clandestino versus Team Rash” and I was Team Rash. That was where me, you, all the homies would go. You could go there to go clubbing or you could go there and just kinda chill on the street across from Birdy’s and smoke your cigarettes, smoke your weed, run into your friends. This and that. It had that quality that people like about Clandestino. It also had sick music and you could go dancing. So there was some art behind it. What I like about New York right now is there actually are—it’s harder and harder to do this—but there are arts communities and I feel embedded in it as much as I ever have here. Even though things feel like they’re often getting worse, people are leaving New York left and right and it stresses me the fuck out because I don’t really have friends anywhere else. New York isn’t all bad. The zine fair this Saturday for 8-Ball, that’s gonna be so fuckin’ sick. We’ve been working on that. We’ve been doing work. We’ve been making shit happen. Linking with people, with other artists, with other zine makers, DJs. We do that shit. We want to get better at that shit. We’ll always have work to do on that. But also the Parkmart thing. Those guys started that shit only a year ago and I don’t know how many they’ve done but that has really taken off. There are people here who want to make shit and go to the chill afterparty but don’t just go to the afterparty just to be seen at it; they go because they like the music playing or they are supporting their actual friends who they make actual art with. It’s weird that maybe people were fatigued with Bushwick as a concept and so they were like, “Boom! Pivot: Dimes Square is also a place where people chill and make art.” I made a meme about this, and making memes is weirdly part of my process now whether I like that or not. I make shit, I can’t read as well, I can’t read good anymore. Reading, to be frank, is a lot harder than it used to be ‘cause my anxiety is a lot worse. I’m way more ADD than I used to be. I always had a lot of energy but now it’s even more scattered than it’s ever been. My practice is my way of trying to corral that pretty scattered energy. And so maybe the essay feels scattered because of that. Maybe my poems feel scattered because of that. But it’s more like an effort to go long. Big works. And those often have higher highs but are messy, make mistakes. There’s so much errata, errors, in longer works because the person printing it didn’t know what the author was getting at there. Sorry, the meme I made was the two really jacked arms interlocking one. You know that one?
Me: Of course.
Will: It was “People who fucking hated my essay” and on the left was “Neo-reactionaries, new Catholics, podcasters (who are both of those things), and their hangers-on.” Kinda obvious. Then on the right was “People who just melt down at the mention of a certain proper noun” and the proper noun, we know the proper noun, it’s Dimes Square.
Me: Say kids, what’s the proper noun of the day?
Will: People panned from Bushwick to Dimes Square just because they were fatigued with Bushwick for the moment as a concept, even though art still gets made there. Bushwick is a concept as much as a place. Same with Dimes Square. Like Lucien is peak Dimes Square but obviously it’s on First and First. I think the big meltdown on Twitter was that one thing that I did and then articles have now done, too, is properly locate an obsession with a place. Some people melted down about that because by naming things—the essay was about language, right? It was about slang, jokes, humor, throwing language around…
Me: Memes
Will: memes, knowing what language means, the way that memes are popular because they are images as much as language and we are living in an image-based society more than a language-based one. Language isn’t necessarily failing, but it’s being pulverized. It’s really having to do a lot of work to capture what we’re trying to mean with it. Once you use language to label something, which I don’t want to call it a success of language, but it’s close to one, we feel like we’ve gotten to something authentic with it. Once you label it, it’s almost so labeled that it’s out. At least with cool culture. Bushwick was out because it was named. But there are mad cool artists in New York. They happen to live where they live. And they happen to hang out where they hang out. And it’s kinda whatever. But all the people with skin in the game, with a stake in whatever Dimes Square has come to mean, they kinda freaked out. Now that it’s so overtly named, there are all these fuckin’ derivative articles, it is fucking exhausting. I don’t ever want to talk about this shit again. I don’t wanna write about this shit ever again.
[Ulysses] is a book I think about indirectly all the time. Today is Bloomsday, June 16, the day the novel is set. It’s based on The Odyssey and you have the Telemachus character Stephen Dedalus. Have you read it?
Me: The first 80 pages.
Will: So you know. Stephen Dedalus, he’s basically a 22-year-old Joyce. His mother has died. He’s in mourning. Still wearing black.
Me: Like Hamlet
Will: There’s so many Hamlet references in there.
Me: That’s his obsession. He goes throughout the novel telling everyone he wants to tell them his exegesis
Will: And it has to do with, if I remember correctly, as Hamlet has to do with transcending the father figure. Leopold Bloom is the bigger main character. He is this surrogate flawed, but better than nothing, father figure. And so he’s Odysseus, obviously. But it’s really just him, not wanting to go home, walking around Dublin all day because he’s afraid his wife is sleeping with [Hugh] “Blazes” Boylan. This sort of hot-boy dandy character.
Me: She is sleeping with him, though. Doesn’t he know that from her letters?
Will: He knows that. It’s ultimately, as with everything in that novel, fact is thwarted and rendered beside the point. And fact is so opaque that you’re having to look at the notes and be like,” Oh, this is what happened.” It’s cool that it has so much Shakespeare in it because when I was having to read Shakespeare in college—I love Shakespeare—I literally just read Sparknotes so that I knew what the fuck was happening so I could actually just read it for language and not have to grapple with what the plot was so much.
Me: I liked what Nabokov said about Shakespeare. That he’s better at metaphor than he is at action, or something like that.
Will: Which I relate to. Action is not always my forte and I think that’s what frustrated people about the way I write. Obviously, it induced a lot of knee-jerk, intense reactions. But I was also coming to terms with being a well-liked person and a polarizing writer. It’s interesting when you have something of a microphone and are writing for a magazine. But I want to get back to Joyce obviously. Is that alright?
Me: Am I interjecting too much?
Will: No, you’re great. You’re fine. Leopold Bloom’s father is Jewish; it’s not even his mother. So is he even Jewish? But obviously in a pretty homogenous city like Dublin that ultimately doesn’t matter. He’s Jewish enough.
Me: He experiences anti-Semitism, which means that he doesn’t get to choose whether he’s Jewish or not.
Will: One-hundred percent. Bloom is not a perfect man.
Me: He’s a pervert, right?
Will: Yes, you could call him a pervert. There’s a famous scene with Gerty MacDowell. Every chapter is written in its own style, which really I’m obsessed with. I feel like Ulysses both made my life and broke my brain. There’s no way to write normally after reading a book where the narrative device is that malleable and weird. And I feel like there’s a reason I really like Joyce and Nabokov even though they were kind of ass-holes as people. Nabokov loves Gogol. There’s that weird host quality. It’s almost like courteous and overly formal but it’s funny. It’s a voice. The writer is having fun. It’s is not necessarily them talking. It’s more this mouthpiece that can go off the rails.
Me: It made sense to me that he liked Borges.
Will: Who?
Me: Nabokov.
Will: Oh, 100 percent. For the sort of puzzles and myth and stuff.
Me: And there’s also an informal quality to some of Borges’ stories where it sounds like you’re sitting around a fireside and someone is telling you a tale, which is very Gogolian as well. What is “The Nose” is not a campfire story? It’s the original “Metamorphosis.” Instead of what if you woke up a giant insect, it’s what if you woke up and your nose was missing.
Will: Totally. It’s hard to read Gogol, Kafka, Nabokov, Bulgakov—Master and Margarita, that’s another book like Ulysses that is this massive document that is almost foolish to take on. The author has to know that it’ll take a decade to finish because its scale is so big. It’s both rambling and then both are pinned to classic texts which sort of grants them this form, this architecture, this referent, but then they get the freedom to be really quirked up.
Me: Wait, what’s Master based off of?
Will: Faust.
Me: Oh really?
Will: And Jesus Christ. It’s all about Yeshua. It’s all from Pontius Pilate’s perspective and he’s faced with having to kill Christ.
Me: All I know about that book is there’s a talking cat.
Will: And so yes, the other half, it’s like pivoting between the Bible and Moscow. And it’s like mid-Soviet, ‘30s, ‘40s. The other half is Satan. Mephistopheles and his retinue causing trouble in Moscow in a specific time in history for Moscow where this author knows that he’s writing for the drawer. He’s writing for this manuscript to be discovered posthumously. He cannot publish it. What I’m more saying though is that I kind of got obsessed with these wildly ambitious novels as a young person. At the peak of my reading skill in retrospect ‘cause I was a little less cracked. And they’re in me but I’m too fuckin’ cracked to write something that long. At least now.
Me: I think authors shine best when they start with a shorter work. When you publish your 750-page debut, it’s just like you’re not ready for that.
Will: Oh yeah. I also got obsessed with short, slim, strange books. My sort-of mentor Kate Zambreno is an amazing writer who enfolds selfhood, dailyness, and life, but she’s an art critic, too. She’s blending art criticism, novel, poetry. She reads a lot of Barthes.
Me: Like a Kris Kraus thing?
Will: She’s better than Kris Kraus. Anyway, she put me onto a lot of books like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee which is indescribable but amazing. And [Kate] writes these slim, strange type books that really show you what non-fiction can be. Books like Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz. A book that is like, “Who the fuck cares what genre that is. That guy is just going the fuck off.” She showed me that I could write short books because that seems doable. But I feel this influence of these bigger books because they’re so difficult but ultimately life-changing to read.
Me: Do you think people today have the attention span to read something like that? Is that a lost art?
Will: I don’t know. I don’t think I would have read Ulysses if I hadn’t taken a class where that was pretty much all we did. I don’t want to get all boo-hoo about what people do and don’t read. It’s OK. Reading can be really hard. But I do want to re-read Ulysses because it affected the way I think about daily life so profoundly. It is this living document. It feels like the internet before the internet, too. It’s like an algorithm. Like the book is adapting and changing and devouring itself and devouring information it’s presented to you. There’s a part where Leopold Bloom, who has been called a cuckold and y’know a kike and everything all day, the night town scene is written in the style of a German Romantic play. But then it has this Freudian, carnivalesque atmosphere where things from the brain—the Id or whatever—are being made manifold in this plastic, stretchy, surrealist hall of mirrors chapter. He’s transformed into a woman and fisted by the brothel madam. It’s like the way the text is coming alive feels weirdly related to the way the internet can come alive and adapt and get crazy and devour things that we know we can say, but then we’re just fuckin’ saying them and shit’s going crazy. The influence of that novel on my brain feels weirdly related to life where you’re connected to people on Instagram even. Today, I’m walking here. I run into this guy who liked my piece and had DM’d me and I run into this dude when I’m docking my CitiBike who I met at Paragon on Saturday. That’s so Joycean. The way people are running into each other in a walking city and the way you’re encountering phrases on signage, graffiti. I think about that shit so much probably half because I read that book. It’s showing you that that way your brain is working on a daily level. Singing a bit of a song lyric that’s been in your brain since childhood. That kind of work being presented to you as art obviously, clearly, changed my life.
Me: If I may, there’s something, in a counterintuitive way about that novel, that’s like punk rock.
Will: Yeah, I feel kinda dorky liking it as much and I do, but it goes so hard.
Me: What I mean to say is like, he does these things with language and plays around with words and makes up his own words and he basically deconstructs the novel to the point where you can almost see the cords sparking in the back. You can get an idea of how one might be able to write a novel because he’s torn it into so many pieces. It’s punk rock in the way that you could hear a song with three chords and be like, “Wait, so I could maybe actually…”
Will: It’s a bit DIY. It’s sort of a maddening chapter, a lot of them are, which is also kind of punk, to have such disregard for the readers’ comfort is so fuckin’ badass to me. But, also, I get that not being for everyone. There’s a chapter where they’re in the hospital. It’s sort of a slow chapter. It’s after the nighttime revelry prostitute crazy bender scene and they’re sobering up a little bit with some friends at the hospital. (Stephen is a medical student.) The language of the text is changing every 30 lines or so to a new writer showing you the gestation of the English language and, ultimately, overtaking it and surpassing it and becoming gibberish, which, you know, that’s memes. … Do you have any more pressing questions? I don’t care. I’m open.
Me: Did your feelings get hurt after the response to the article?
Will: I’m not gonna lie, it was a lot. Yeah, for sure. But it’s kinda funny. Enough people reached out to me that it was worth it. Enough people I know or talked about it with. The people who I talked about it with in its earliest stages, I’ll fuck with those people for life. Also, the people who I kinda know or basically met because they’re friends of friends and hit me up, that was really lovely. It all amounts to something very abstract in a way but maybe something is added to my attention to the daily. I run into people from this experience and it becomes material actually and not just an internet event—the “Dimes discourse”—and that is cool to me that it can become real. I think people really were hurt. I think the line that really hurt people was when I called them trend-riding hangers-on, basically. That was probably the most inflammatory phrase beyond the stuff about Dasha and Anna, which I was edited on for sure throughout the process. That section, we re-worked that. Being edited is a gift but it’s also definitely odd. Especially with something like this that had such a potential to be inflammatory.
Me: And you went to bat for certain stuff, too, which, in the past, I haven’t felt so comfortable with my editors to even voice something like that.
Will: I would have never felt comfortable writing this piece if I hadn’t felt comfortable advocating for myself. I just hit a point where I feel comfortable advocating for myself as a prose writer.
Me: How many pieces have you done for The Baffler? What was that, number three?
Will: This was five. I wrote this whole piece for them about James Baldwin in Hollywood, trying to adapt Autobiography of Malcolm X into a screenplay, and it was ironically pegged to this film series in conjunction with Hilton Als show at [David] Zwirner about Baldwin that was screened at Metrograph and they were showing all these different Baldwin shorts and so that led me to be able to try to write about his obsession with film and desire to be in film. Whatever, that piece went really hard, and it died in limbo. I was really pissed and I didn’t write for The Baffler for two years. And I worked there as an assistant at one point. So it’s just like a pretty particular relationship. But Zach [Webb], who I worked with on this piece, is a fucking gem and it was really fun to collaborate on the editing process with him. I advocated for stuff, like the scene that got a little bit mocked with the older, Jewish woman in the park. The whole Jewish thing is just a joke obviously. It’s just a counter to the fake-Catholic thing and that neighborhood is Jewish as fuck, historically, and I feel like gesturing to that history was necessary for me. And that piece is about place, as much as anything else. But then, obviously, naive-gate was pretty crazy. With [Spike editor] Dean [Kissick] and all. I felt like I was asked to add some shit to that section ‘cause I was really just using that quote to illustrate what I was trying to transition from. Graffiti to Angelicism. And masks and anonymity and being really into a graffiti writer and then finding an interview with them and almost being like, “Oh fuck, do I even wanna read this?” It’s almost intense to learn but it was also a beautiful interview and I had to quote from it. The [graffiti artist] Wombat interview. But then the quote from Dean about masks another editor thought it was a stupid quote. He sounded dumb. The editor was like, “This is a bit of a silly quote.” And so I added something at their behest like, “somewhat naively said” and it got cut to “naively” as history will have it. And then there was the amazing meme of bleached-hair Dean Kissick with “Naive” below it that I’ve seen circulating. That’s almost my favorite, the most Cellectuals style meme to come out of the article and then its aftermath. That was a lot for me because that wasn’t my choice and that felt kinda weird.
Me: Especially because he was harping on it.
Will: I thought he was being funny and I almost appreciated it. But it also got old. I DM’d him and he was like, “It’s cool. I like the fractured discourse,” which I appreciate. If I see Dean around I’d probably say what’s up and talk about it. That’s maybe why I’m ultimately interested in just putting out some poems and shit because I’m willing to edited but it’s not criticism where you’re being a little bit more inflammatory inherently because you’re trying to describe culture. That’s kind of a derided thing right now because of the era of the think piece. I get why people are sick of it but if we don’t make room for other types of writing than the think piece we’re so fuckin’ cooked.
Me: It’s kinda like an ouroboros where the think piece is so derided but it’s what people read and what people react to and what people don’t realize who are not writers is we don’t dictate the style, the style sometimes dictates us.
Will: The style of [my] piece, that’s an out of body experience. It just came in places. What maybe people missed is that it was a pastiche of Dean’s style, of whatever the fuck my style is (there is a Gogolian quality of a weird host voice that I sort of fall into sometimes. That voice, people fuck with it or they don’t and that’s OK with me. It is what it is.) It’s that thing that I do, the sort of way Dean meanderingly moves through culture in New York, and then almost parodying Angelicism and meme culture. Those are the four big things. I feel like people missed it. It was a style, it was a voice. That’s not the only way I know how to write. I would hope not.
Me: I feel like you were doing your Joycean thing.
Will: Yeah, it was very Joycean. I kind of realized afterwards. That’s why I’ve been thinking about it today.
Me: You’re Bloom walking around the neighborhood.
Will: Sure, and I feel like that’s why I’m drawn towards writing about him. And this misunderstood, Ashkenazi, masculinity that gets you called a fuckin Incel on fuckin’ Twitter. If you didn’t like my article you’re an anti-Semite. That was the thing I didn’t tweet. You can quote me on that. I didn’t tweet it for good reason. I am a very careful person. I like getting along with people. But clearly, I also like drama enough to put this out into the world.
Me: You were going on this thing last week where you were like, “My style is inflammatory.”
Will: I dunno.
Me: Do you take that back?
Will: No, I don’t take that back. I kinda want to write this…I don’t know how to fuckin’ write it, but I want to write this book or story and I only have the first section and the first section is set at 6:20 the morning of 9/11. If you look on the website of the George W. Bush library, their website is pretty dope. Even freakin’ 9/11, it shows you where he went all day. And he was all over the place. He was in Florida when he woke up, then he goes on a run, later he’s in a bunker in the Southwest. No one’s flying in America, but George Bush is flying across America that day and he delivers a speech in maybe D.C. that night. Anyway, all I’ve written is the morning of because it’s the most fictional because nothing’s happened yet. It was also a bit Joycean, Gogolian, Bulgakovian, whatever you want to call it, or the way the DeLillo, all of his conversation sounds like everyone’s him, but it’s still fun because he’s a fun writer. I was basically doing a voice that I can’t help doing but then it’s also in George Bush’s head so it’s just like maybe I can’t write any more of it because nothing has happened yet, it exists so purely, naively, in the realm of fiction. And I can just write as George Bush going on a run on the coast of Florida as a secret service van follows him discreetly and his feet are on the pavement and he’s a little bit tired and the sun’s coming up and he sees an iguana on the side of the road—you know Florida—and it’s beautiful out, he’s thinking about the game last night. The Rangers game. At this point, he’s no longer an owner but he’s thinking like one. He has money in it. And they’re bad. They have A-Rod. They made this huge signing. Huge, huge signing. They’ve paid this baseball player the most a baseball player’s ever been paid and they fucking suck. He’s going on a run and he’s fucking thinking about it. It’s bothering him. That space, I, for better or worse, sometimes feel like a writer who gets stuck in that space of pure play. There’s so much freedom that you don’t know what to do with it creatively. And then, I sort of sit on it. That’s a project that excites me right now. Baseball, too. That World Series. My parents didn’t have to the TV on a lot during the day after 9/11. I’ve obviously seen footage, though. As an adult, I forced myself to watch a lot of footage which was kinda fucked but I think something people we know do or have done. A lot of my memory of it at that time, which I remember because I was just old enough, is from print media. But then it was also from the World Series, which was after but was delayed because the season halted for probably two weeks after 9/11. So, if I was to write this project it would have to include that. That was my awakening to the very idea of zeitgeist. That this was way bigger than Yankees x Diamondbacks. It’s like jets flying over Yankees’ stadium. It’s an American fuckin’ extravaganza.
…
Will: I’m not a dramatic person, but
Me: Wait, you’re not?
Will: I’m a lower case d dramatic person, I’m not a capital D Dramatic person always, but when I write, and I think you sense this when you read Ulysses or when you try to read Ulysses that there’s this guy who’s trying to write a fuckin’ book and he’s like has a lot goin’ but it’s still hard to sit down and actualize it. And it’s very restless and it’s sort of like so big that it’s a fuckin’ mess and I really relate to that process on the page mess. For me at least, for other people who make things, that becomes pretty vulnerable. You’re showing enough process and you’re showing enough of yourself. That essay had a speaker. It’s sorta me but it’s just sorta coming out of me. It’s in the place of fiction, that voice, and a little out of body. Even putting it out there is very earnest and so I do think it’s very easy to deride liking anything. Or, having something of an opinion or even vaguely resembling what someone online would call a libtard. And so it was kinda easy to act like I was a liberal, Blue Check person which Brad Troemel implicitly did in one of his rundowns. But it was about other things and I liked that interview but that was just funny to me. There has to be a place for making art in earnest. I believe pretty strongly in that. And I don’t think it’s lame to be like intense and pretty nihilistic but also want to have community and like care about things or other people. I think we can do that. I knew it would be a challenge to write about all this because it was fucking cringe, but, you know my friend Jordan Coley, I was with him really briefly and he was like, “Everybody’s worst fear right now is being cringe.” And I was like, “Fuck yeah, that’s so true.” I was drawn to that a little bit masochistically. That interests me. I can’t finish anything if I’m not throwing myself in a situation, a pickle, you gotta write your way out. Having constraints or discomfort like that or writing towards something a little bit cringe I find kind of leads to more playful work. And so I tried to transcend cringe. If people wanna call it cringe, I took that risk, that’s fair, I can live with that.